James Shepherd Pike

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James Shepherd Pike (September 8, 1811 – November 29, 1882) was an American journalist and a historian of

Reconstruction Era
.

Biography

Pike was born in 1811 in

Kansas-Nebraska Act, calling for the formation of a new political entity to oppose it. Pike wrote that a "solid phalanx of aggression rears its black head everywhere south of Mason and Dixon's line, banded for the propagation of Slavery all over the continent."[1] His reports were, "widely quoted, bitterly attacked or enthusiastically praised; they exerted a profound influence upon public opinion and gave to their author national prominence, first as an uncompromising anti-slavery Whig, and later as an ardent Republican."[2]

President Abraham Lincoln appointed Pike to be minister to the Netherlands, where he fought Confederate diplomatic efforts and promoted the Union war aims from 1861 to 1866.[3] On returning to Washington in 1866, Pike resumed writing for the New York Tribune and also wrote editorials for the New York Sun.

Pike was an outspoken Radical Republican, standing with Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner and opposing President Andrew Johnson. Long before black suffrage became a major issue Pike had come to believe that the freed slaves must be given the vote. Pike in 1866–67 strongly supported Black suffrage and the disqualification of most ex-Confederates from holding office.[4]

Pike did not admire

Ulysses Grant, denouncing the corruption of his administration.[6] Pike's boss, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, was the Liberal Republican nominee in 1872. Greeley lost to Grant by a landslide, then died. The new editor of the Tribune Whitelaw Reid sent Pike to South Carolina to study the conditions in the deep South under Reconstruction.[7]

Pike's reports on South Carolina

In 1873 Pike toured South Carolina and wrote a series of newspaper articles, reprinted in newspapers across the country and republished in book form in 1874 as The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government. During February and March,

Reconstruction
government in South Carolina, that systematically exposed what Pike considered to be corruption, incompetence, bribery, financial misdeeds and misbehavior in the state legislature. His critics argued that the tone and emphasis was distorted and hostile toward African Americans and Grant Republicans.

The Prostrate State painted a lurid picture of corruption. Historian Eric Foner writes:

The book depicted a state engulfed by political corruption, drained by governmental extravagance, and under the control of "a mass of black barbarism." The South's problems, he insisted, arose from "Negro government." The solution was to restore leading whites to political power.[10]

Historian

Reconstruction on the Grant administration and on the freedmen, whom he despised with equal passion.[11]

Durden wrote that the fundamental clue to Pike's hostile characterization of African Americans in his book The Prostrate State was that "in the 1850s no less than in the 1870s, . . . [we see] his constant antipathy toward the Negro race."[12]

In his biographical study of Pike, Durden concluded that Pike had been ardently "free soil" before the American Civil War because he thought that the West should belong to the white man. Durden said Pike despaired of living alongside arrogant slaveholders and their repulsive human property, and that he urged peaceful secession during the 1860-61 crisis partly because he had one eye cocked on the chance of getting rid of a "mass of barbarism" and that during some of the Civil War's darker days he would have settled for a compromise peace if it meant only that a Gulf coast or Deep South "negro pen" would be lost to the Federal Union. Durden wrote that The Prostrate State makes sense only in this context, and to the extent that Pike's racial views were representative, "the Civil War and

Reconstruction take on a new dimension of tragedy."[13]

Historian Mark Summers concludes that Pike stressed the sensational, but "however maliciously and mendaciously he shaded his evidence, his accounts squared with those of his colleagues

Cincinnati Commercial.[14] James Freeman Clarke, a leading Boston abolitionist, visited South Carolina and reported back to his Boston congregation that the facts presented by Pike, "were confirmed by every man whom I saw."[15]

Durden (2000) reports:

A sweeping indictment of Republican rule in this state (and, by inference, other southern states), Pike's dramatic, "eye-witness" account gained much attention throughout the country. The book was so popular because it was seen as the work of an allegedly impartial Maine Republican and old foe of slavery who had come to his senses about the "wicked corruption" of the carpetbaggers and their "ignorant and barbaric" Negro allies. Pike's book not only played a role in the ending of Reconstruction but was much used by historians well into the twentieth century. In fact, it was far from objective, simply reflecting Pike's long-standing racism.

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Durden (2000).
  2. ^ Van Cleve 1934.
  3. ^ Durden (1957), pp. 64–65.
  4. ^ Durden (1957), pp. 161, 168.
  5. ^ Durden (1957), p. 186.
  6. ^ Durden (1957), p. 197.
  7. ^ Durden (1957), pp. 201–22.
  8. ^ Pike, James Shepherd, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro government, preface (dated October, 1873), D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1874.
  9. ^ Spirit of the age. [volume] (Woodstock, Vt.), 29 Jan. 1874. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
  10. ^ Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History (2nd ed. 2008), vol. 2. pp. 577–78.
  11. ^ Franklin, John Hope (February 1980). Mirror for Americans: A Century of Reconstruction History. Vol. 85. The American Historical Review.
  12. ^ Robert Franklin Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882, p. 249.
  13. ^ Robert Franklin Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882.
  14. ^ Summers, 193.
  15. ^ McPherson, p, 41.

External links

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